Daddee 2013

[tab10]Dad leaned over and fired his head at the tree. The tree screamed. There was no one in the forest to hear.[/tab10] [tab10]The ghost is in me, dodging bullets no one can see.[/tab10] —From a poem

Kim[1. Kim had an island-shaped birthmark on his cheek. They burned it off when he had shock treatments. I do not know who they were. I do not know why they did it.] was next to walk over to the car as it sat grumbling, trunk open, a plaid shirt hanging from the open trunk. He held out the shoebox filled with his stuff.

Dad grabbed the box from his hands. Shook it. Lifted it up nearer his head, then tilted his head sideways, shaking it. Kim’s eyes were wet, and watching him, I could see his upper lip start to tremble. “There’s no room for this shit. You know that, you little son of a bitch.” And with that, he slowly, with great precision, turned the box upside down from a height of about three feet, watching Kim as Kim watched the contents fall out, landing in a jumble at his feet, something made of glass breaking, something else rolling off into the bushes at the side of the dirt path to the one door to the little house we were leaving after three weeks. Kim started to shake, the lines in the ripped brown striped t-shirt[2. I had a ripped blue striped t-shirt.] quivering over the hollow of his pigeon chest. He started one large inhale to cry out, then another before that one was done. I couldn’t watch any longer. I knew what came next—first the back of the hand across the side of his face, then maybe the cane, now leaning against the fender of the DeSoto, down across Kim’s head, and then screaming and more screaming, and we would be late sneaking away from this place Dad had never paid the rent for, and that would only make things worse. I swooped down out of the sky, angling sharply through the treetops directly behind Dad, gaining speed from the sunshine that was disappearing, and my outstretched arm did not sag as it held the oversized butcher knife. At the last second Kim looked up at me as my swoop reached its lowest point, my arm was jolted by the impact of the knife with Dad’s neck, and as I climbed back up into the sun above the clouds, his head rolled lopsidedly  off into the mud beside the tap where we’d gathered water for the few weeks we’d lived there. My last sight had been the look of incredible surprise on its face. Kim smiled a small smile, tears and snot mixing on that grubby little face. I killed him many, many times that summer.[3. Except Saturdays when I would take a quarter and go to the library and bring back as many science fiction books as my little arm could carry and a Coca-Cola (15 cents) and a Malted Milk bar (10 cents) and needles (shoplifted) for his eyes if he found me. I never had to kill him on a Saturday for some reason.] I poured hot lead into his mouth while he was sleeping, drove things into his eyes in the dark, spit foul pus and deadly germs into his food as it was stuffed into his braying mouth, surprised him with a can of gasoline thrown in his face, a beaker of the most powerful acid, a matchbox filled with ravenous alien insects hungry for flesh. By the time I was starting school, I was running out of places to put his corpulent, swollen bodies, whole and in many, many parts. I was forever changing into my other clothes, or taking Kim’s if I didn’t have any. There were bloodstains, gore and terrible fluids crusting on almost every surface of every house, apartment, trailer, and motel room we infested. I knew I would get caught, and I knew that neither Kim, nor my mother,[4. Who he told us had had sex with dogs, which is what made us.] nor the other kids would do anything to cover up for me. I had made them all happy by doing what they had wanted to do but had not had the nerve to, but they were still what they were, and I was what I was. I didn’t do what I did for their gratitude, though. I did it because I had to, and I had the power to, and Dad never seemed to catch on to the fact that his final moments were almost continually upon him. I never gave him the chance to say anything in that dripping voice of his, never gave him the chance to feign even an ounce of insincere sorrow or remorse. His was the crime, mine the punishment. I could even then hear you creeping up on me, panting to stand in judgment of crimes you found repugnant. You would never be able to understand how a child like me could be so strong, so resourceful, so masterful, so utterly able to deal with the hardest of situations, and to do what had to be done. You would say I was too intelligent to resort to the extreme forms of violence I chose to use, that I was somehow unnatural. I would suffer your criticisms, happy at least that he was dead. Because he first killed us all when I was just a child, much younger than I was then. He came home drunk, ran the Ford station wagon up onto a snow bank so that it tilted almost sideways, and almost fell out the passenger door and had to pick himself up from the sludgy mess of oily grey snow and water where he should have parked. And he caught my mother, or maybe it was me, laughing at him, struggling to freeze our jaws in our face as we looked out through those yellowed venetian blinds to see if he had a bag of groceries. None of us were near the door when he crashed in. I forget, I was either under the camp cot bed in the back room, or maybe I was huddled down by the furnace in the crawlspace basement, trying not to sneeze. The sounds were sudden and loud, like taking a steak and hitting it against the edge of a door. I don’t know who it was. Then I heard Kim. I think it was NO, he was saying, and then the little whimper as he died. I tried to freeze my mind from thinking what he was using.[5. This never, ever, ever, ever, never worked.] Was it a stick? Had he gone and got a butcher knife from the kitchen? Was he using his fists?[6. Fat hands, always really, really, really dirty, disgusting hands, never soap, always that can of stuff mechanics used that seemed like warm jelly and got wiped off on rags, which would get stiff and be no good for wiping his blood.] Then his sound was closer. I could see the bottoms of his feet, noticed for the hundred-thousandth time that the bottoms of his dirty green baggy work pants were frayed and ragged and flapped under his shoes. Then he found me. I didn’t so much die as explode in all directions, a very liquid atomic explosion which took him with me, I am sure. I whirled apart. I ripped open and all the stuff fell out. Bones popped through skin. That was the first time he killed us all, and he was not caught, he just up and moved us somewhere else. I used to watch him kill us on television sometimes. Other times, I would sneak down after they were all dead and read about what he had done in whatever pieces of newspaper were left on the linoleum tablecloth. When we had a radio, I would twirl the knobs up and down the dial until I got a reedy station which offered a play-by-play description of what he had done to us this time. Sometimes he would smash the radio while I was listening. Sometimes he would knock it down off the shelf onto the floor and stomp around on it. When he did this sort of fat man dance, he told us he was pretending it was us, he was stomping us to death because we were a bunch of worthless leeches. We were a bunch of worthless leeches. We sat around wanting him to come home, to come home with food, to come home and say something else other than get your stuff together we have to move, NOW, he would always yell NOW. We wanted him to not take the screwdriver he carried in his back pocket for protection and stab us. We wanted him to not take one or two of us with him to the church house and make us stand there to prove he needed them to give him money. We wanted him not to take me out in the car when he had to make the others feel crummy. We wanted him to not throw himself back in the chair and then jump up and go to the hall closet and reach up with those arms with the fat that woggled, and take down an irregular shape of a blanket around something, and it be the sawed-off shotgun he was keeping for someone, and him throw the tattered baby blanket[7. Mine.] onto the floor and nudge the safety off the gun and point it at us and tell us what worthless shits we were that he’d be better off if he pulled the trigger. Most of all we did not want him to point it at us and pull the trigger. We were a bunch of worthless leeches that made his life a prison, which is why he would be better off if he just did it and went to prison where things would be so much better. All we did was want things. He tried as hard as he could, he yelled, he couldn’t take it anymore, he yelled, we could all go to hell and he’d send us there, he yelled, come here, he yelled, go there, he yelled, do this, he yelled. I never wanted us all to die. I never wanted to have to kill him over again and again until I was throwing up chunks of him all over the floor there was so much. I ignored him until he was dead and I was grown up. He went away and never went away, and kept coming back because I never saw or thought of him again. I played out his life while trying to do it all differently. That’s why I finally killed myself because I could not stand it, and the absence of it, and because killing was what we had always done and it was I suppose what needed to be done. I watched myself killing myself on television. Then I read about it in the paper. Then I would turn on the radio to hear how I had done it this time, to ensure that I had taken nobody with me. I never wanted to tell anybody, because I would then have to do it all over again. If I tell you about this, we will have to kill each other, and then maybe we can go over and sit down on the couch and turn on the television to catch the coverage of our deaths.[8. ____________________]